DBTA E-EDITION
June 2009
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Trends and Applications
In today's competitive and crisis-ridden market, companies are under pressure to rapidly deliver results and make necessary changes—which requires that decision makers have accurate and timely information readily available. However, many executives have doubts about the timeliness of the information they now receive through their current BI and analytics systems.
Enormous data volumes in complex systems exacting high total cost of ownership (TCO) are endemic in today's enterprises. Must this always be the case? Not for enterprises and agencies using today's advanced data virtualization to simplify data complexity and reduce costs, time to solution and risk.
Compared to the myriad group of "integrated" systems that most companies are managing today, master data management (MDM) solutions are much simpler to manage and maintain, and provide companies with more business benefits. Unfortunately, MDM technology is developing a reputation for being complicated and taking a long time to implement when the reality is that the process can be dramatically simplified if companies plan before they implement.
Sybase turned in the best year in its history in 2008, followed by its best-ever first quarter in 2009. Brian Vink chats with Database Trends and Applications about what he sees as the key issues in information management, the company's partnership with SAP and the plans to revamp TechWave this year.
This is a time of great change for data centers. Technology is advancing and getting smarter, and workloads and performance demands keep growing. For this issue of Database Trends and Applications, we sought a range of industry views on the most profound—and perhaps unexpected—changes reshaping data centers and enterprise it.
Columns - Applications Insight
Virtualization has changed the IT landscape more dramatically than perhaps any other technology introduced over the past decade. Virtualized environments are omnipresent in the modern data center due to their economic advantages in hardware consolidation and manageability.
Columns - Database Elaborations
There comes a time at the start of a new engagement when the data architect must acquaint himself with the system for the first time. When first learning about a new application, the relevant data, and its foundational concepts, many questions are reviewed.
Columns - DBA Corner
Before we even begin this month's column I had better define what I mean by a "black box." Simply put, a black box is a database access program that sits in-between your application programs and the DBMS. It is designed so that all application programs call the black box for data instead of writing SQL statements that are embedded into a program. The general idea behind such a contraption is that it will simplify application development because programmers will not need to know how to write SQL. Instead, programmers call the black box to request data. SQL statements become calls-and every programmer knows how to code a call, right?
Columns - SQL Server Drill Down
Now that I know I can post, let me state at least some of what I stated broefe.The thinking patterns of a person is something that is learned over time and is driven by success and motivation and curiosity. Success , of course, does not necessairly mean the greatest success to be had, but some success.Outside of people like you and I, most get rather lazy about thinking and once they become somewhat successful are reluctant to improve further.Optimizing SQL require one of two approaches: (a) an intimate knowledge of how the underlying database works basically, how it will parse the SQL, how it will attempt to optimize the SQL, how it will attempt to match it to indexes and the like. The other approach is by trial and error .Alas, SQL, if my may say so myself, sucks as a language. Basically, it works hard at trying to hide all the low-level machinations of the database system; yet you can't write good SQL unless you deal with those low-level machinations!!! The very fact that it hides these details makes it even trickier to optimize, because its optimizer is trying to be a one size fits all , and it has to guess about a lot.Indeed, in optimizing SQL, not only are you dealing with the low-level machinations, but you are also dealing with the default assumptions of its optimizer, as well! It's kinda insane having to work around both.So, that certain data analyist will never be able to deal with all of these complications. He is to be understood, actually, because he is actually trying to use SQL in the way it was intended so as to not have to deal with all the low-level details that he shouldn't have to deal with anyway.Alas, this is really the failing of many, if not most computer languages, ORMs, and other systems designed to simplify and to hide complexity to really effectively use them eventually you have to understand the complexity it's trying to hide you from, and worse how it's trying to hide you from it!!!!!It's amazing how little has changed over the years. I ran into these same issues dealing with Microsoft's infamous MFC framework, and even Java. I had to deal with this in my C and C++ days, and also had to deal with it when I wrote a lot of PHP code.So, for just kicking it around, the SQL language it great! But when you get serious that all the limitations comes to the fore. And this is true of nearl everything in computerdom.My, this came out quite a bit different from what I wote broefe!
MV Community
BlueFinity International, a member of the Mpower1 Group of Companies, will present a free webinar on Thursday, June 18. The webinar will focus on how to create a simple SSIS transformation to move MultiValue data into MS SQL using BlueFinity's new SQL integration tool, mv.SSIS.
U2 University planning is moving forward on schedule, according to IBM. U2U will be held in Denver, Colo., from September 16 through September 18; and in Liverpool, UK, from October 13 through October 15. Plans are in the process of being made for U2U in Sydney, Australia, to be held from November 17 through November 19.
Revelation has announced Universal Driver 4.6 targeted at organizations running multi-user Revelation-based applications on a Windows Server. Revelation will be releasing two versions of Universal Driver 4.6, including a free version for customers who have purchased a license for OpenInsight 9.0; and there also is a new installer with this version, Robert Catalano, director of sales at Revelation, tells DBTA.